It was, I saw in my twenties, a book that had absolutely ignored everything that science fiction had been doing when it was written. It was built on bones pilfered from Dumas and Dickens (steal only the best). It was clad in a skin of archly sophisticated Mad Ave ur-hipness, with all the grot and glitter of a fully happening dude’s postwar Manhattan (something no other science fiction writer of the era was able to offer). It was, I recognized then, an utterly urban thing. It made most of the rest of its assumed genre look hick.

Bester’s protagonist hurls himself naked from a spaceship, fuelled by hatred. Bester’s novel hurled itself naked from the science fiction of its day, fuelled by something hipper than hatred, more potent. Into that vacuum, and on, into the actual 21st Century, Gully and the book rock.